Maybe I'm not truly talented and you're right (nice no true scotsman though). My paycheck and the fact I can leave a job tomorrow and get a new one for even more money says someone thinks I'm extremely valuable.
Someone simply suggested that VC-backed companies (presumably, often of the startup kind), the company can achieve more economic success when engineers spend some time with customers (and let's not forget that the customer need is the SOLE reason that the engineer's job exists at all).
The hubris is in the failure to acknowledge that you do not represent the entire world of engineers, and the unwillingness to contemplate a scenario where just maybe, an engineer could be better at their job, if they took more time to understand that which created its reason to exist.